Definition
Plain language
The name on a digital ID card that says who — or what — it grants access to.
As stated in the literature
In SSH certificates and access-control systems, the identity or scope a credential authorizes; a single certificate may list multiple principals covering different hosts or roles.
Also called: principals
Why it matters: The principal list is the precise answer to "what does this credential actually let you do," so reading it is how you tell a narrow key from one that opens half the fleet.
For example, one certificate might say it is good for the identities "deploy-bot" and "db-admin," meaning whoever holds it can act as either on the machines that accept those names.
Heard on the show
“They derive the same direction three different ways: this difference-of-means, principal component analysis on the contrastive states, and the normal vector of the trained probe classifier.”Episode 018 — Language Models Compute the Rational Move, Then Override It